The Journey is Our Home

by Kathy Miner

  The Journey is Our Home

  By Kathy Miner

  Copyright 2016 Kathy Miner

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  ONE: Naomi: Woodland Park, CO: July

  TWO: Grace: Woodland Park, CO

  THREE: Piper: On the eastern plains of Colorado

  FOUR: Jack: On the eastern plains of Colorado

  FIVE: Cass: Sailing on Lake Michigan

  SIX: Naomi: Woodland Park, CO

  SEVEN: Grace: Woodland Park, CO

  EIGHT: Piper: Limon, CO

  NINE: Jack: Nebraska

  TEN: Cass: Beaver Island, Michigan

  ELEVEN: Naomi: Colorado Springs, CO

  TWELVE: Grace: Rock Ledge Ranch, Colorado Springs, CO

  THIRTEEN: Piper: Maple River, Iowa

  FOURTEEN: Jack: Maple River, Iowa

  FIFTEEN: Cass: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  SIXTEEN: Grace: Rock Ledge Ranch, Colorado Springs, CO

  SEVENTEEN: Naomi: Woodland Park, CO

  EIGHTEEN: Grace: Rock Ledge Ranch, Colorado Springs, CO

  NINETEEN: Piper: Beaver Island, Michigan: October

  TWENTY: Jack: Beaver Island, Michigan: February

  LAST: Naomi: Pagosa Springs, Colorado: July

  About the Author

  Gratitude and Acknowledgments

  ONE: Naomi: Woodland Park, CO: July

  For the third time, Naomi set the log on its end and centered the axe head on it. She tightened her shaking hands until the axe stopped wobbling, pictured Martin in her mind, lifted the axe into the air, and tried to do as he did.

  Didn’t work.

  The axe glanced off the log again, jarring her shoulders and back, and Naomi discovered she was snarling. Out loud. From where she’d put him on a stay fifteen safe feet away, Hades whined. For once, she didn’t pause to reassure the big, watchful Rottweiler, to send love. She had nothing left to give Hades, couldn’t comfort him, because she couldn’t comfort herself.

  Piper was gone.

  She, Jack and the other travelers had zoomed off shortly after dawn this morning, waved off by the entire community, the sound of their motorcycles a shocking roar in the soft, rosy morning. Everyone, even the elderly and those with tiny infants, had gathered to see them off. Jack had been their leader, and although he’d spent the last several months delegating his responsibilities and had grown steadily more distant from everyone since Layla’s death, he had led them through the early days following the plague and he would be missed.

  No one had stepped up to take his place yet, and there was a shifting, anxious restlessness in the community as a result. Jack’s responsibilities could be divided and shared, but who would lead them? Who would they look to when danger threatened and swift decisions were called for? Who would speak for them, as more and more outsiders found their way here? Naomi was acutely aware of the collective anxiety and was equally aware of how often eyes turned to her now, how often people asked her the questions they used to take to Jack.

  Today, though, she couldn’t care less.

  Today, her only surviving child had once again struck out on her own. But unlike that long-ago, other-life day when she and Scott had moved Piper into the dorms at the University of Northern Colorado, she couldn’t call to chat, to hear her daughter’s voice and know she was safe. Couldn’t Skype, couldn’t hop in the car and make the two-hour drive to see her. Couldn’t turn her attention to Macy and Scott, filling the empty ache with the rest of her family. Today, she was alone. No longer wife, no longer mother. Just taking the next breath hurt more than she could believe.

  She might never see Piper again. Her daughter had disappeared into the morning mist and might never be back. There had to be somewhere to go with the emotions boiling in her chest, the regret making her heart boom, the grief making her vision ebb and pulse with light. Something she could do, some way to let it out. Back at the cabin, she’d cleaned everything there was to clean, rearranged every room, and then put it all back the way it was in the first place. The harder she worked, the harder she tried to not think, the more frantic she felt.

  She had refused to join the rest of the community to see them off, turning her face away from Piper’s goodbye this morning at the cabin, refusing to feel the tears her daughter had been choking back. Fifteen minutes later, she’d been running, running as fast as she could manage with Hades on her heels. Piper had taken the ATV, and when Naomi finally arrived on the edge of the gathering wheezing, staggering, breathless, she’d heard the collective call, the voices raised in fare-wells and safe-journeys, the startling roar of the bikes. Too late. People stared at her wild self, at her halo of snarled hair and the tears she couldn’t stop, and a few of them tried to approach her, to offer comfort. She had snarled at them, just as she was snarling now.

  Too late. Too late to kiss her daughter’s soft face one last time. Too late to give her the protective amulet she’d fashioned, patterned on the one Layla had given her last spring. Too late to wrap every bit of love and mother-energy she had left in her broken-down heart around her girl, as if that would have made a difference. As if anything would make a difference. Her daughter was heading into a violent, desperate, unpredictable world. She may as well have jumped off a cliff.

  Naomi centered the axe head on the log again, glaring fire at it, then swung the axe up and brought it down with all her strength. It bit this time – bit deep and stuck. She jerked at it, then jerked again, yanking and cussing.

  “Naomi! What in hell are you doing?”

  She ripped the axe free and swung around. Martin was standing beside Hades, hands propped on his hips, face dark with irritation. He took a half-step back when she turned, his eyes widening slightly, his body falling into a defensive posture. Oh, the gratification of that. The ferocious satisfaction his wariness brought her. Hades tensed as he picked up her mood, shifting into a silent crouch, his body taut with the potential of menace. Naomi hefted the axe, saw Martin’s eyes flicker to it, to Hades, then back to her, and she exulted.

  “Show me how to do this,” she snapped. “Now.”

  Martin’s eyebrows rose slowly. He stared her down for a handful of heartbeats. Then, he moved to join her. “First, put the log lower, on the ground – here, on this bed of wood chips so you don’t damage the axe head. You need your full range of motion, to make up for what you don’t have in upper-body strength. Feet apart. Hands apart.” He accompanied his words with nudges of his own feet and hands, and then pointed at a crack on the log. “Hit it right here.”

  She listened to every word he said and did exactly as he told her, striking the log precisely, feeling the axe head sink deep again. Amazing, how much easier it was. Martin grunted approval and helped her lever the axe head free. “Again. Same spot.”

  She split the log on her second strike, and he set up another without a word. They fell into a silent rhythm, broken only by the “chunk” of her axe and the increasing huff of her breathing. She lost track of the number of logs she had split by the time he reached for the axe.

  “That’s enough for now.”

  He took hold of the axe, but Naomi refused to let it go. As she’d worked, the burning in her gut had eased, replaced by the burning in her arms and shoulders. Her stomach clenched at the thought of stopping. Stopping meant thinking. “I’ll finish the pile.”

  “No, you won’t.” He popped the axe out of her hands with maddening ease. “Best way to get hurt splitting wood is to keep working when you need a break.”

  She grabbed at the axe, missed. “I don’t need a break.” She grabbed again, and felt the snarl boil up her throat once more. “Give it back to me. I said give it back!”

  “Naomi.”

  She looked
up. Exasperation and a sad knowing on his features this time. As soon as their eyes met, the dam broke.

  “I didn’t say goodbye!”

  The words wailed from the depths of her. Dimly, she heard him sigh before he maneuvered her to sit on one of the large, un-split logs. Huge, tearing sobs felt like they’d rip her chest apart, but she couldn’t begin to stop them, rocking back and forth with the force of her misery. Martin up-ended a log beside her and sat, letting her cry it out. Not until she was swiping at her streaming nose and hiccupping brokenly did he touch her, his big, warm hand landing on her shoulder and squeezing. She looked up at him through swollen eyes.

  “Well. I bet you won’t make a dumb-ass mistake like that again, will you?”

  The old, soft Naomi would have been crushed and outraged, cut to the bone. The hardened thing she’d become barked out a laugh and shrugged his hand off her shoulder. She shook her head, lifting her t-shirt to scrub the tears and snot off her face. “Thanks, Martin. You always know just what to say to make me feel better.”

  She tipped her head back and stared at a summer sky so blue it looked like a painting. A steady, increasing breeze picked up the wisps of hair that had escaped her braid; there was monsoon energy in the air in spite of the blue sky. Before the day was out, she was sure, they’d have thunderstorms. Where would Piper and the others take shelter, she wondered? The tears welled up again. She let them flow this time, gentle cleansing instead of violent catharsis.

  “The ironic thing,” she said to the sky, “is that I’ve been acting just like her. Just like Piper used to act when she was a teenager. Not talking to her unless I had to, refusing to look at her.” Her throat tightened up, but she kept choking the words out. She needed to get this out. “I thought she’d see how hurt I was, that she’d change her mind about going. Or about letting me go with her.”

  “You could have gone with her. If you had really wanted to go, she couldn’t have stopped you.”

  “No, she couldn’t have. But she didn’t want me to go.”

  She swallowed and turned her face away; no need to remind Martin of the words Piper had hurled at her. He had been there when she’d done it. There had been plenty of witnesses to that mother-daughter throw-down.

  They had been gathered at the church to begin working through the practical details of the travelers’ departure. Weeks before, the call had gone out in the community for people willing to travel with Jack and Piper. Ed, their former neighbor, had been the first to volunteer, showing up to the meeting with his scruffy dog at his side.

  “Maybe I’ll swing down to Texas after we get Jack settled,” he had said. “See if I’ve got any family left other than Rosemary, here.” At the sound of her name, Rosemary had lifted adoring eyes to Ed’s face, and his hand had dropped to rest on her head. “As long as I can bring my best girl, I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s going on in the rest of the world.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Owen Weber had also stepped up. Layla’s death and the loss of their unborn child, so soon after the loss of his wife and children in the plague, had brought the quiet giant of a man to his knees. His eyes had been haunted, hardly lifting from the floor as he spoke in a voice rusty from disuse. “I can’t stay here. I have people in Minnesota. Might be I’ll head there when we’ve found your sister, Jack. But I can’t stay here.”

  Naomi had glanced nervously at Jack, but if he was feeling anything other than compassion, he didn’t let it show as he nodded his acceptance. The meeting had progressed with a discussion about mode of travel, and as opinions were offered and expanded on, Naomi had been aware of the ever-increasing tension emanating from her daughter, a tension that had been building steadily since Piper had announced she’d be leaving.

  They had argued about that, of course. Naomi had said everything she could think of to dissuade her, but Piper would not be moved. Eventually, Naomi had been forced to admit her daughter’s reasoning was sound: Piper wanted to put distance between Brody and her, wanted to help Jack find his sister, wanted to expand on the historical record she’d started during her time with Brody’s group and start creating connections between the scattered communities, like theirs, that had to be out there.

  Naomi had come to understand those reasons, especially the first of them. She had also assumed she’d be going with them, and began to plan accordingly. As the weeks had passed, though, Piper had grown increasingly tense whenever Naomi spoke of the trip, increasingly silent. Naomi had ignored it. Deep inside, though, she had known what those silences meant. Piper had confirmed her fears, breaking in as Naomi had been lobbying for travel on horseback.

  “Mom, stop!” Piper’s words had burst out of her, and she had closed her eyes for a moment before going on in a calmer tone. “It’s not going to happen. I should have said something sooner, but I didn’t want to hurt you. You’re not going with us.”

  It had taken Naomi long, breathless moments to get her voice working. “I am going,” she had insisted. “Of course I’m going, Piper. I have to. We just found each other again.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. But we need to travel as fast as possible on the way there, and horses just aren’t practical. You’ve never driven a motorcycle, and –”

  “I can learn! I learned to ride a horse, didn’t I? I’m not like I was before, Piper. I’m stronger now, more fit, and I –”

  “Mom, I don’t want you to go!” Again, the words had erupted out of Piper, and again, she had modulated her tone, meeting her mother’s eyes steadily. “I’m sorry it hurts you, but I don’t want you to go.”

  An awful silence had followed Piper’s quiet words. The reactions of the others had been telling: Jack, Ed, and Owen had all looked down. Naomi could feel their respect and their sorrow for her pain, but none of them spoke up in support of her. Martin’s eyes had been steady on Naomi’s stricken face, and his hand had found hers under the table. He had known this was coming, Naomi realized. Whether he had guessed or Piper had told him didn’t really matter, because he didn’t argue with Piper, either.

  “It’s not…I just…” Piper had hemmed and hawed in very un-Piper-like fashion, and Naomi had felt the swooping roller-coaster of her emotions: terrible guilt warring with a powerful yearning. For freedom. From her. “Mom, this is just something I need to do on my own. I just need…some space. Some distance from…everything.”

  Naomi had risen from the table where they had all been seated. Too hurt to feel angry. Too frightened for her daughter to feel humiliated. Martin had started to rise with her, but she’d stopped him with a raised, shaking hand. She had left the room without another word. Preparations had gone forward without her input or involvement, and the confrontation had never been spoken of again. Until now.

  Martin handed her a handkerchief before she could swipe at her face with her t-shirt again, and she took it, murmuring a thank-you. Somehow, he always had a clean handkerchief, even now, when laundry was a much more difficult chore than in the time before, and people were becoming accustomed to going about daily life much grubbier. Naomi blew her nose, then returned her eyes to the sky, wishing she could pull that cool blue inside her and soothe her heart with it.

  As hurt and frightened as she had been by Piper’s decision, she was still a good mother. And a good mother did not smother, stifle, coerce or manipulate her children. Not ever, not even in these times. “I could have gone with her. You’re right. I could have insisted on following her or guilt-tripped her into staying.”

  She looked at Martin, feeling empty and angry and lost. “But then what? Do I follow her around for the rest of our lives? Do I cling to her forever? Refuse to let her go? When it was time for her to go to college, she couldn’t wait to get away, to get out on her own. She hasn’t changed, and she never will. Piper has been walking away from me since she took her very first steps.”

  “She loves you. You know that.”

  Naomi heaved a deep sigh. “I do. And it’s not an angry thing anymore, thank God. But Piper is a seeker.
She has a gypsy’s soul. The plague, everything she went through – none of it changed her basic nature. She is who she is. I could feel how excited she was to go, all tangled up with her guilt over leaving me.” Her throat tightened. “I miss Macy, so much. She was a homebody, like me. Scott and I used to joke that we had one of each. Piper started asking for her own apartment when she turned 16, and we’d have been nudging Macy out on her 30th birthday. Now, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who to be without being a mom to my girls.”

  Martin snorted softly. “So. Empty nest syndrome on steroids, then.”

  Again, he surprised a bark of laughter out of her. “Yeah.”

  A soft, chuffing bark drew Naomi’s attention, and she turned to meet Hades’ worried gaze. Unless she was in physical danger, he stayed where she put him, though it distressed him terribly to see her cry. Naomi clicked her fingers twice, releasing him from the stay, and he shot to her side. The big dog pressed close, rumbling softly in contentment under her stroking, scratching hands. As always, contact with one of the dogs calmed and comforted her.

  She looked around for perky, golden, butterfly ears and bright eyes, blinked in surprise at the impressive pile of wood she’d split, then looked at Martin. “Where’s Persephone?”

  “With Grace.”

  He looked away as he said it. Naomi frowned. She’d been so caught up in the boil and turmoil of her own feelings, she’d been oblivious to all else. Her frown deepened as she examined his familiar profile, seeing the subtle lines of strain that only someone who knew him well would see, feeling the undercurrent of distress in him.

  “What’s wrong?” Worry made her words sharp. Martin’s daughter, Grace, had become so precious to her. “Has something happened? Is Grace okay?”

  “She’s fine. She’s at the library with Anne, like always. She’d sleep there if I’d let her.” But he still wasn’t looking at her.

  “Then what are you so worried about?”